In the forest beyond Sky Drowning City, the trees were older than kingdoms, older even than names.
They grew from crimson soil, their bark smooth and dark like obsidian, leaves fluttering in hues of deep blue and violet. It was said that these trees grew only where blood had once been spilled in great volumes. The forest was called The Grove of Memory, though it bore no markers, no monuments. The earth remembered what mortals preferred to forget.
Here, Ashen sat cross-legged beneath a weeping dusk-elm and began to cultivate for the first time.
He had no master. No sect scrolls. No divine heritage to guide him.
Only the memory of pain, and a question that burned like a coal in his chest:
Why must the weak always suffer in silence?
The world Ashen belonged to was not a mirror of the mortal realm. It was not ruled by imperial courts or celestial bureaucracies. The demon world, known in ancient scripts as Ōn'Dariel, was made of shifting provinces, each governed by a Philosophy, not a throne.
There was:
The Province of Echoed Sorrow, where cultivators trained to master emotions as weapons.
The Spine of Thorns, where pain was revered as the path to power.
The Ember Reaches, where entire villages vanished into the volcanoes to commune with elemental spirits.
Sky Drowning City, by contrast, belonged to no province. It was a forgotten place, a sanctuary one of the few where the old demon ideals of balance and peace still survived.
But the world beyond was unkind to such softness.
Ashen knew his mixed blood made him different. But it was not until he entered meditation that he truly understood how different.
When he closed his eyes, he didn't feel one river of energy. He felt two.
One flowed like molten iron, heavy and thick it was demonic qi, ancient and visceral, humming with instinct and primal memory. The other was like crystal-clear water human qi, rational, methodical, brittle in its clarity.
And yet… they did not fight.
They circled each other like dancers, reluctant but curious.
Ashen's breath steadied. He guided the two currents slowly, painfully, into his dantian. He visualized a spiral black and white, fire and ice, blood and light spinning tighter and tighter until it fused into a single, flickering flame.
It was imperfect. Unstable. But it was his.
Cultivation Level: Ash Root Realm, First Leaf
His limbs ached. His soul trembled. His mind whispered a thousand doubts.
And then… something awakened.
A memory that was not his.
He saw a battlefield drenched in ash and gold. A woman in silver armor, her horns broken, standing tall even as her chest was pierced by a spear of holy light. Behind her, a baby cried wrapped in black silk. Beside the corpse of a man whose face was both human and demon.
Ashen's eyes flew open. The world snapped back. He gasped.
Sweat poured from his brow, but the cold around him had deepened.
He looked at his trembling hands.
"Was that... my mother?"
The demon world had a saying: "To awaken one's blood is to awaken one's ancestors."
Ashen had awakened something. Not a legacy. Not a blessing.
A burden.
Later that day, he wandered into an old ruin deep within the Grove of Memory. Moss covered the broken walls, and ancient demon glyphs pulsed faintly under the moonlight. There, he met a man who would shape his path.
He wore a tattered blindfold over empty eyes, and his skin was pale as bone. A strange scent clung to him neither blood nor incense, but memory itself.
"You carry the scent of two worlds," the blind man said. "And the fear of both."
Ashen narrowed his eyes. "Who are you?"
"I was once called Shai-Mordren, Keeper of Forgotten Oaths. But now I am just an echo. A warden of broken things."
Ashen said nothing.
Shai-Mordren tilted his head. "You seek power not for conquest, but for protection. That is... rare. Most who walk this path are running from weakness, not walking toward strength."
"I don't want to see another friend torn apart by humans," Ashen said. "Or another innocent child dragged away because she was born with horns."
Shai-Mordren smiled, though it held no joy.
"Then learn this: power is not truth. It is a choice. A promise. A chain. You may cultivate ten realms and still lose your soul in the first."
Ashen lowered his gaze. "Then I'll learn to carry chains without breaking."
Shai-Mordren gave him three gifts,
A Soul Rooting Manual, written in demon bone script—meant for cultivators of impure bloodlines.
A single Tear of the Nether Phoenix, which could heal mortal wounds once.
A truth: "The humans do not fear demons because we are cruel. They fear us because we remember. And memory is the greatest rebellion."
Ashen returned to the edge of the Grove with his satchel heavier and his eyes colder.
His cultivation had begun. Not just the strengthening of flesh or spirit, but of purpose.
He spent weeks practicing the Soul Rooting Manual. He learned how to balance the two streams of qi inside him how to anchor one in the body, and the other in the soul. He learned to absorb death essence from fallen plants and bones. He trained with spears made of shadow-thorn and practiced defensive stances used by ancient demon warriors who had fought without rage.
He had no sect, but he had a path.
And in the evenings, as he sat beneath the dusk-elms, he whispered names of those he'd seen fall.
He was becoming something the world did not have a word for yet.
Not a cultivator.
Not a demon.
Not a human.